It's impossible for me to critique choreographer Jitti Chompee's latest show Melancholy Of Demon without viewing it as part of a larger project, which also includes a film, a book, a photo exhibition, a dance demonstration and a seminar of a more academic nature. The show was staged at Lido Connect from March 18-22. This review is the first part of an essay about the project and focuses only on Melancholy Of Demon.
(Photos: Piyatat Hemmatat)
Jitti's work has always been characterised by the co-existence of dance forms that were born in different places and times and of dancers rooted in different traditions. Dancers who work with Jitti are the kind interested in climbing out of their artistic confines.
Jitti himself comes from ballet and contemporary dance backgrounds and has been working with khon dancers for years. Anucha Sumaman, a khon dancer in the demon role, is his long-time collaborator. Jitti doesn't just work with dancers, either. A glass harpist and a magician have made appearances in his creations. Jitti usually lets his performers be, to a degree. He never tries to turn a ballet dancer into a tap dancer, a ballroom dancer into a khon dancer, a magician into a glass harpist. Anucha, for example, often ends up performing typical khon choreography in Jitti's productions, among disparate elements.
As a director and choreographer working with khon dancers, Jitti had up until now been more of a collage artist than a deep diver: he cut and pasted dance forms, disciplines and images together. I found many of his previous creations, though aesthetically pleasing and at times entertaining, incoherent.
For an experimenter, Jitti is strangely over-attached to his "signatures" -- noisy inhalation, wearing the khon mask backwards and dancing with the back to the audience, pulling the shirt over the head. Instead of cultivating and growing them into something more, he plugs them in his works for no apparent reason, sometimes in excess.
In Melancholy Of Demon, Jitti hasn't broken some of his worst habits or parted with his signature elements. Some of the aspects of khon I had never seen him explore before, namely the thread in the khon mask that performers use to manipulate with their mouths and femininity in male khon dancers -- were treated only on the surface level and only as images. A performer pulled a string out of his mouth and coiled it around his finger. In a few scenes, one performer crawled onto the stage wearing a long black wig backward, as if the wig alone was sufficient symbol of femininity.
That said, the one-hour show is still Jitti at his most restrained in years. His exploration of khon has deepened, and I sensed a new and interesting path being forged. And since Melancholy Of Demon exists in conjunction with a larger research project, its excesses and incongruent elements could be forgiven because the show felt like an artists' playground -- a necessary space and process in any artistic development.
The most exciting new addition in his work is his experiment with two- and three-dimensionality in khon. The image of dancers' limbs digging their way out of a white wall, sectioned off into vertical and horizontal picture frames, was captivating. First, a hand emerged, then an arm came through, then a masked head popped out, then a foot, then a leg. These parts moved, sometimes danced, and interacted with each other, but they also didn't always seem to belong to the same body.
Jitti had toyed with images of disjointed bodies before through positioning of the khon mask on the body and through two dancers' bodies conjoining or hiding behind each other to form one strange human body. With the wall, which was more effective in hiding the body, the khon mask could be transformed into a puppet, manipulated less by the mouth and more by the hand, widening the possibility of its movements and expressions.
This was the first time Jitti worked with text and traditional khon music and singing. Although if you have little to no knowledge of the demon king character, Tossakan, it is unlikely you'll learn much more or anything at all about the character from simply watching Melancholy Of Demon.
The title of the show suggests that the piece is centred on a demon character, but throughout, there was no real focus on the demon in any coherent way. The folksy quality of much of the middle part of the show -- the lewd humour and a choreography that are based more on everyday movements and gestures -- distracted and confused. Then that atmosphere was abruptly replaced by a more serious and sadder one at the end.
That was when we got to witness khon dancer Anucha execute a dance sequence while singing. He's not a trained singer, and his singing acted more as a personal compass to guide his movements. The moment beautifully underlined how music, words and stories live inside a khon dancer's body. It was like watching a khon dancer rehearsing in private.
Jitti's choreography could have done more to bring out his performers' talent and to explore the potential of dancers with different backgrounds to cross their borders and not merely coexist. We never really got to see how Anucha, trained in Thai classical dance since 12, and Anand Wongpisan, trained in contemporary dance, would have adopted other forms of dance into their bodies. Also underused, too, was singer Yarnawut Traisuwan, who trained in both traditional Thai singing and Thai classical dance. It would have been interesting to see him dance and sing the way Anucha did.
